where nnnn is the code point in decimal form, and hhhh is the code point in hexadecimal form. The x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros. The hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style.

In contrast, a character entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined (built into the markup language) or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition (DTD). The format is the same as for any entity reference:

&name;

where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. The semicolon is required.

95 characters; the 52 alphabet characters belong to the Latin script. The remaining 43 belong to the common script.
The 33 characters classified as ASCII Punctuation & Symbols are also sometimes referred to as ASCII special characters. See § Latin-1 Supplement and § Unicode symbols for additional "special characters".

^Deprecated as of Unicode version 5.2.0 [1] "U+0149 Latin small letter n preceded by apostrophe was encoded for use in Afrikaans. The character is deprecated, and its use is strongly discouraged. In nearly all cases it is better represented by a sequence of an apostrophe followed by “n”." [2] pg. 208